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Most other coaches will tell you niche selection is about finding the best number of potential clients, and the best selection of potential products to sell, with the least possible competition. Yes, you have to pay attention to that – but that’s common sense.
There’s more.
For most bloggers, picking a niche is as “simple” as saying “I’m going to blog about making money online”…
(Because it’s huge market, and you can sell a lot of stuff to a lot of newbies)
Not surprisingly, most blogs fail miserably.
You see, there’s more to choosing a niche than just picking a broad topic and cranking out posts about anything you deem interesting.
For instance – if you read my post on internet marketing business models, you would know that “making money online” covers a very wide spectrum. In fact, you can add many “work from home” opportunities (network marketing as well as selling services) to that.
So if you want to blog about making money online, what do you want to blog about? Do you want to blog about blogging (which is a wide topic by itself), coaching, Adsense, network marketing, different forms of advertising, social marketing, mobile marketing…
You get the point.
The problem with going too wide in your niche selection is this:
Let’s say you blog about anything connected to making money online. You have people visiting your blog posts about Google Adsense, SEO, membership sites, copywriting, blogging and traffic generation.
What do you sell to them? No matter what you offer them, some of the people will find it irrelevant. Your aim is to attract an audience narrow enough that you can offer a product or service to them, and most of them should be potential customers.
So – who do you want to attract?
Note: You don’t have to narrow it down so much that you only have one line of topics. You can combine a few – but they all have to be related so closely that any person in your audience should be a potential customer for any product you recommend or create.
Niche meets Positioning:
Positioning refers to how you will be presenting yourself. It determines not only who you attract, but also how you resonate with your visitors.
Positioning is partly about what you are capable of, and partly about sliding into the cracks between the competition. Considering your current capabilities and the approach you want to take, how can you differentiate yourself from other people in your niche?
Think about the type of person you want to attract to your blog – what would matter to them? Make a list. Then see which of those needs you can address. Lastly, go look at what other people in your niche do – and see which combination of needs and wants you can address to set yourself apart.
Go take a look at the questions people are asking frequently (which you would be able to answer/research) – on forums and social groups. Plug those questions into Google, and see which ones return the fewest results. Now see if you can find something which most of those people (who posted the questions) have in common – or if there is a common need among a reasonable group/percentage of people.
Now you have found a range of needs which aren’t addressed as well as they can be. Start your blog using this. You can always expand on it as your audience grows, and as your expertise improves – but start where there is “an empty space on the market” – within the niche you want to blog about.
In conclusion:
At the end of the day, selecting your niche and defining your position within that niche isn’t just about numbers. Fair enough, there has to be enough people who are searching for what you want to offer, or you will face an uphill battle. But in essence it comes down to this:
a. Select a broad niche that is something you are either passionate about, or at least interesting enough that you can see yourself writing about it indefinitely. If you don’t at least find it interesting, it’s going to become hard to keep going – especially during the first while when you keep slogging away with very little results.
b. Determine the area(s) of that niche that has less competition but enough demand/need, and which you can step into. Your capabilities have to fit the needs – or otherwise your blog posts won’t resonate with your visitors.
c. Position yourself as the person delivering on that demand/need.
By doing this, you will enter into a niche you are happy with, and set yourself apart from the competition.
That’s exactly where you need to be.
